Hacking about – how did our water efficiency hackathon go?

July and August saw four companies analyse our historical water efficiency data (you can still see it here and here) to help us answer the question

How can we improve the efficiency of our in-house visits – can we improve the estimated savings or make it more cost effective to deliver?

Over AMP7 we’ve committed to continuing our in home audits, but would love to offer it to a larger section of our customer base. To do this we needed to understand if there were ways to deliver it more cost effectively, either through understanding our demographics more and what savings were achievable, or improving the estimated savings made.

We’ve collected a large amount of data from our current programme, but our analysis has been limited. Given the industry wide focus on water efficiency and water use we thought it would be an interesting exercise to share the data more widely and see what industry experts would make of it.

Artesia, Meniscus, Solo and WSP all rose to the challenge, with teams delving into the data, running it through algorithms and feeding it into decision engines to see what they could find.

The team from Artesia looked at how our savings estimates could be improved, focusing on particular devices and where they were installed.

WSP looked at the engagement stats, and whether there were any trends we could exploit for future schemes.

Meniscus created a decision tool in their calculation engine, creating wards within the region and ascribing them values to prioritise delivery.

And Solo built a Power BI dashboard to provide in-depth monitoring of the programme allowing the delivery to be tracked continuously.

Our judges, Philippa Bond (Participation Strategy Manager) and Dan Green (Head of Sustainability and Innovation) had a tough time choosing between the companies for the winner; each had focused on a slightly different aspect of the problem and had excelled in their area.

However, there can only be one winner, and so the judges decision was……….

Artesia!!!

Pippa commented ‘It was fantastic to see what teams did with our data – the range of approaches was brilliant, and it’s definitely provided some input on how we can make better use of our data next AMP to deliver the programme. Thanks to everyone who took part.’

Congratulations to the team, including Aidan who had just joined the company and was thrust in at the deep end!

We’ll be looking at how we can apply these learnings to our AMP7 delivery and will also feedback on our plans for future hackathons. With some great suggestions from the participants on how we can take them forward we’ll be looking at ways to further engage.